Hardware-efficient quantum simulation of intense-field QED

Abstract

Strong electromagnetic backgrounds make quantum electrodynamics a real-time nonperturbative problem involving dressed fermions and dynamical photons. We propose a trapped-ion protocol for simulating intense-field QED in $3+1$ dimensions in the Furry picture. The construction encodes photon modes in collective phonons and Volkov-dressed fermion modes in ion spins, combining native spin-phonon couplings with Clifford circuits that compress nonlocal Jordan--Wigner strings. For nonlinear Breit--Wheeler pair production, the protocol has polynomial resource scaling and is benchmarked against exact single-mode dynamics with controlled Trotter errors. With experimentally motivated phonon heating and dephasing, zero-noise extrapolation substantially reduces deviations in photon-survival and pair-production signals. These results provide a hardware-efficient route to intense-field particle-production dynamics beyond perturbative or static-field descriptions.